By Alex Mitchell in Canberra
A SHOCKING upset win away in Newcastle would be one of the biggest victories of Ricky Stuart’s lengthy NRL coaching career, but the Canberra mentor’s record in finals shouldn’t be underestimated.
Stuart has won seven of his eight first-week finals matches throughout his career, his most recent triumph last season’s 28-20 elimination final upset of Melbourne away from home.
In fact, the 20-year coaching veteran boasts a better winning percentage in finals than in the regular season with each of the three NRL club’s he’s guided in finals campaigns.
The Raiders are longshots with bookmakers for Sunday’s clash with the red-hot Knights but that’s only fuelling their players, star prop Joe Tapine suggesting Stuart’s motivational message would bring out his inner “mongrel”.
“No one’s really got any confidence we’re going to win the game and (Stuart) really fires you up in that sense,” Tapine told AAP.
“You want to prove people wrong, you want to go real mongrel and do the hard stuff to get the result.
“And that’s not gonna be any different this weekend.”
Stuart’s dedication to his players can’t be questioned.
He sobbed through a farewell speech to departing duo Jack Wighton and Jarrod Croker at Tuesday’s club awards ceremony, with the former expecting he’d cook up some sort of plan to stifle the Knights.
“‘Sticky’ just loves winning, that’s the thing,” Wighton told AAP.
“It filters through to the players, he tries to get everybody to do the same thing.”
The newest Raider – last week’s debutant Hohepa Puru – has already noticed the love and pride his coach brings after he called on the 21-year-old at such a crucial time of the year.
“On the weekend, he just said ‘you’re not here to fill shoes, there’s no pressure on you mate, I just want you to enjoy your first game’,” Puru told AAP.
“He told me he’s just as proud as my mum would be with me so that meant the world.
“He’s got every belief in me that I have nothing to worry about, so that means the world and gives me the confidence to go out there and do what I think I can do best.”
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![Teacher Vanessa Jones has been living in Higgins since 2001, and while she loves the area, she says she is “fed up” with the neglectful ACT government.
The Higgins shops have been completely abandoned, says Vanessa, preventing the opportunity for residents to have a community-centred space to socialise.
They only received bins nine months ago, she says, and requests for a water station and repairs to the bus station have gone unanswered.
“It’s very, very slow,” says Vanessa.
“I asked for the zebra crossing on Fullagar [Crescent] to be repainted, and we had to wait about six or nine months.
“That’s just such a long time… we pay a lot of rates.”
Vanessa says assistance from the government only seems to go to communities with time-rich and assertive communities, leaving places such as Higgins, where the majority of households have both adults working full-time and English may not be the first language of the family, at an automatic disadvantage.
“If you’ve got two people working, paying a mortgage, raising two or three kids, they don’t have the time,” says Vanessa.
Vanessa says the lack of attention quieter places such as Higgins is receiving is starting to look a lot like favouritism.
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